thoughts and insights about social and environmental responsibility and sustainability reporting

Friday, July 26, 2013

G4: that Materiality thing again

This week, I came across an interesting and very detailed account of a materiality process. It's the Mountain Equipment Co-Op's (MEC) 2013 Materiality Matrix. MEC is a Canadian outdoor gear cooperative with 16 retail stores across Canada, over 1,700 employees and $300 million in sales, of which 1% is donated back into the community. MEC produces an annual Accountability Report, and the 2012 report is a self-declared GRI Application Level B. The report is all online, and several supporting materials are provided as PDF downloads, including:

a DMA overview, which is a short summary of the management policies in the six categories of the GRI guidelines : EC, EN, LA, SO, HR, PR

a stakeholder panel report, which is a summary of the specific feedback received from a Stakeholder Panel, together with MEC's responses

For the first time, MEC also publicly shares the detailed approach and process of developing a Materiality Matrix. The MEC process follows four steps:

Identifying and mapping stakeholders

Developing a list of possible sustainability topics

Rank and prioritize the issues

Review and revise with input from senior management

This is a standard approach, and not too dissimilar from the process recommended in GRI's G4 Implementation Manual:

G4 Implementation Manual page 32

However, the challenge, as always, is in the doing, rather than in the definition of the process. MEC is one of the few organizations that have done it. MEC identifies 45 material issues grouped into 12 material topics:

I find this to be a thorough and transparent approach to materiality which provides stakeholders with a clear picture of what's important in the MEC world of sustainability and its impact on them. In fact, this is probably the sort of stuff that G4 reports are made of.

And as we mentioned G4, if you haven't managed to wade through 300 pages of technical guidance yet, you might be interested to know that Understanding G4 is now available for purchase and use.

Designed to meet the needs of Chief Sustainability Officers, SME Owners/Managers, CEOs, Sustainability Consultants, Sustainability Report Writers, Sustainability Report Assurers, Academics and Students, Investors, Shareholders, Suppliers, and all Stakeholders who are interested to know how to use G4, and what they should look for in a G4 report, this book is an indispensable support tool. As I am already involved in the preparation of at two G4 reports for our clients at Beyond Business Ltd, I am already using Understanding G4 myself :).

Understanding G4 contains some valuable tables which are immensely useful for finding your way around G4:

G4 required reporting elements

Comparison of G3 and G4 General Disclosures

Material Aspects covered by G4

Changes in the number of performance indicators

Specific Standard Disclosure Tables

The G4 SWOT

The G4 Decision Matrix

Principles for Defining Report Content

Principles for Defining Report Quality

Here's a screenshot from the table comparing G3 and G4 disclosures at different levels, an important step in the G4 transition planning:

You can also see more, and download a freebie chapter on our G4 Guru Facebook page, which is another place to raise questions, comments, experiences, feelings, frustrations, queries, requests etc all about G4, and the G4 Guru will respond as best she can.

In the meantime, without having completed a full G4-Ready Analysis on the MEC Accountability Report, it seems to me that one of the core building blocks is already in place.